Virtual or physical prototypes? Development and testing of a prototyping planning tool

A new prototyping planning tool guides designers in choosing between virtual vs. physical prototyping strategies based on answers to Likert-scale questions. We developed this tool to augment prior work in design methods seeking to facilitate prototyping strategy development. This new tool was tested with a pilot experiment in which engineering students were tasked with optimizing the design of a four-bar linkage to be used to draw a specific shape. The students were then instructed to use the new prototyping planning tool to decide whether to create a virtual or physical prototype of a four-bar linkage, with the goal of maximizing the performance metric detailed in the design problem statement. This paper describes the new prototype strategy planning tool, the pilot experiment, and results and conclusions. The very encouraging pilot results provide a template and strong motivation for conducting a larger scale experiment for generic prototyping applications.

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